NEW DELHI (Morning Star News) – When police took
Gornath Chalanseth from his home in eastern India early on the morning
of Dec. 13, 2008, he assumed they only wanted to question him over minor
political activity in his capacity as a member of the local village
council.

Except for two brief releases on bail, he would spend the
next nearly 10 and a half years in jail for the murder of a Hindu
leader that Hindu nationalists falsely accused him and six other
Christians of committing.

At the police station that December day
in 2008, the officers put Chalanseth in a police van and drove off. When
he did not return after a few days, his family asked after him. They
were told that the had been taken to the jungle along with Christian
suspects Bijay Kumar Sanseth, Bhaskar Sunamajhi, and Budhadeb Nayak.

Later
they heard that he and six other Christians had been charged with the
murder of Laxmanananda Saraswati. The Hindu leader’s Aug. 23, 2008
murder by a mob of 30 to 40 assailants with automatic weapons and
locally-made revolvers led to a misguided backlash in the following
months – India’s largest anti-Christian violence. More than 100 people
were killed, around 300 church buildings were destroyed, close to 6,000
homes were demolished and at least 55,000 Christians were displaced from
their homes.

Maoist leader Sabyasachi Panda claimed
responsibility of the murder that occurred in the attack on Saraswati’s
ashram in Jalespeta, Tumudibandha, Kandhamal District, Odisha (then
Orissa) state, and the state government corroborated his confession. But
Hindu extremists who blamed Christians marched Saraswati’s body in a
160-kilometer (100 miles) route along predominantly Christian areas
calculated to provoke violence. An estimated 75 percent of the
anti-Christian aggression that followed took place along the procession
route.

Chalanseth and the six other Christians – Sanseth, Nayak,
Bhaskar Sunamajhi, Durjo Sunamajhi, Sanatan Badamajhi and Munda
Badamajhi – were convicted of murder, criminal conspiracy, unlawful
assembly and rioting by Additional District and Sessions Judge Rajendra
Kumar Tosh on Sept. 30, 2013. Two prior judges presiding over the trial
were transferred before Tosh heard the case and delivered the verdict.

Ten
years, five months and six days after he was taken into custody,
Chalanseth walked out of prison on May 21, again released on bail. This
time, however, because the Supreme Court issued the release on bail, he
does not have to return unless the high court itself so orders.

“The
Supreme Court ordering bail for Gornath has exposed the Hindu
nationalist fraud behind Kandhamal,” journalist and activist Anto
Akkara, who has publicized the injustice against the Christians in books
and other media, told Morning Star News. “The bail order proves that
Swami Laxmanananda’s murder was used to trigger the bloodshed and [the
accusation against Christians] was cooked up by the Hindu nationalists
for political gain.”

Akkara has kept the campaign for the release of the “innocent seven” alive through an online petition, www.release7innocents.com.

He noted that one of the seven, Munda Badamajhi, is a mentally challenged person.

“It’s
a shame for Indian judiciary to keep an innocent and mentally
challenged in jail for a crime he never committed,” Akkara told Morning
Star News. “I met Munda in the jail in June 2017. While others were
excited with my presence, Munda was bland and showed no emotion even
when I approached him. He does not know where he is.”

The
conviction without evidence raised many questions. While the judge
portrayed Saraswati as “a luminary of Hindu community who dedicated the
whole life for the tribal community of this underdeveloped district of
Orissa,” his judgment relied on the testimony of two witnesses, Malati
Pradhan and Kumudhini Pradhan, who were about 11 and 14 years old when
Saraswati was murdered. Both went on record to say that they saw Sanseth
and Durjo Sunamajhi outside Saraswati’s room when the murder took
place.

Delivering the verdict five years after the attack, the
judge justified his confidence in the testimony of the girls by noting
that they were students of Sanskrit.

“A student of Sanskrit requires high memory power to get the Sanskrit verses, slokas,
etc. in mind,” he wrote. “Therefore, even if investigating officers
have committed an error by not examining them at an appropriate time,
this Court cannot refuse to accept their credibility.”

Why Now?

India’s
Supreme Court granted Challanseth bail after two earlier applications
were rejected by other courts; the Odisha High Court rejected the last
one in December.

“There were two grounds on which the Supreme
Court has granted bail, one being the number of years [10] he has spent
in jail, and the second is the nature of evidence against him, which was
slim, shifty and weak,” attorney Rebecca Mammen John told Morning Star
News.

John, an accomplished and well-known criminal lawyer, has
more than 25 years of practice before trial courts, the Delhi High Court
and the Supreme Court of India. Working pro bono especially on
important civil liberties cases and on behalf of victims of sexual
violence, John appeared along with lawyers from Alliance Defending
Freedom (ADF) to help procure bail for Chalanseth.

Supreme Court
Justice Ajay Manikrao Khanwilkar and Justice Ajay Rastogi gave the
orders for Chalanseth’s bail on May 9, stating, “Considering the fact
that the accused No.4-appellant [Challanseth] had already undergone 10
years of his sentence, and taking an overall view of the matter, we are
of the opinion that the above named accused No.4-appellant should be
released on bail on such conditions as may be imposed by the learned
Additional Sessions Judge, Phulbani in S.T. No.16/18 of 2013-2009.”

Chalanseth, 46, was
greeted by family members with the exception of his 90-year-old father,
Bachan Chalanseth, who could not make the journey due to health
concerns. The family traveled almost six hours from Kotagarh to receive
him. Media outlets captured the tearful reunion as nearly two dozen
members of his family embraced him.

Expressing joy over the bail
granted to at least one of the seven imprisoned Christians, John Dayal,
spokesperson of the United Christian Forum, said Akkara is to be
congratulated for keeping the case before the public eye.

“One
needs to remember that most of the legal vultures who descended on
Kandhamal in 2007 and 2008 vanished after the early pickings were over,”
said Dayal, who has worked for justice in the aftermath of the
Kandhamal anti-Christian violence. “If it were not for HRLN [Human
Rights Law Network], the Bhubaneswar Cuttack Archdiocese, Evangelical
Fellowship of India and in recent times ADF, the legal landscape of the
place would have been really tragic. Congratulations collectively to all
those over the years who have labored hard, and in the current bail
case in the Supreme Court, especially to Senior Advocate Rebecca Mammen
John.”

Chalanseth has said that although he is happy to be
released, he is concerned about the six others who are also innocent and
remain in jail. There is hope that his release could set a precedent
for the others.

The Rev. Dibakar Parichha, a Catholic priest at
the diocese of Cuttack and an attorney at the Cuttack High Court, has
been assisting in the effort to obtain justice for seven years.

“We
have a long way to go,” he told Morning Star News. ‘We are hopeful for
getting justice for the innocent people. It may delay, but justice will
not be denied.”

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